


To Begin With

by Aubry



Category: A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens, Thursday Next - Jasper Fforde
Genre: Gen, Jurisfiction, Misses Clause Challenge, Mystery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:16:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094292
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aubry/pseuds/Aubry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The last time Thursday Next read <i>A Christmas Carol</i> she'd just buried her brother Anton in the Crimea. Now Thursday is the Bellman of the BookWorld, and something has gone terribly wrong inside Dickens's most famous festive story. It's up to Thursday to restore the ghosts to Scrooge's Christmas, and face down some of her own ghosts along the way.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Begin With

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ars_belli](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ars_belli/gifts).



> This story draws quite a lot upon the text of _A Christmas Carol_. I didn't go in intending to write it that way, but as is so often the case that's how it's turned out. I hope the story still works even if one is only loosely familiar with the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge and his ghostly visitors.
> 
> I wrote this for ars_belli. Happy Yuletide. I hope you can find in this fic something of the things you like about Thursday Next. Thank you for your prompts, I had a great deal of fun thinking about Thursday and her missing moments.

Now, what I wanted was facts. And the facts appeared to be these: To begin with, Marley was on strike. That was only the tip of the iceberg, though. Things were seriously awry in Dickens, and _A Christmas Carol_ was evidently right at the heart of the trouble. Industrial action and collective bargaining in the BookWorld are a headache at the best of times. (I wasn't Bellman back then – I didn't even know about book jumping– but Commander Bradshaw insists that things have gotten more fractious since the '82 edition of Marx's _Capital_ was published in Penguin Classics.) This was emphatically _not_ the best of times. With Christmas only a week away, and with re-reading and adaptation season in full swing, Jacob Marley was holding us all to ransom.

It wasn't lack of effort on Jurisfiction's part. To date, three teams of agents had tried with a will to get the ghost of Scrooge's late partner to the bargaining table. We were hampered by the fact that nobody could find him. Right now, he wasn't even manifesting for Scrooge. We'd tried beef, mustard, cheese, and underdone potato, but nothing could summon him forth. Emperor Zhark had set up an ingenious device to make the bell in Scrooge's rooms ring just as they do in Stave I. When that didn't work he'd tried a rather less subtle approach using an irradiating death-ray. He claimed he'd once used it to take out the ghost-pirates of Alpha Zeta Tau. That didn't work either. Marley remained elusive.

There was nothing else for it; I was going to have to go into the book myself. 

I tracked down Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle to tell her my plans.

“Are you sure it's wise for the Bellman to go in to bargain with Marley, dear? He'll think he's got tremendous leverage.”

“He _does_ have tremendous leverage,” I said grimly. “But I have a few tricks up my sleeve.”

Tiggy beamed as well as an erinaceomorph can. I sounded more confident than I felt. Usually, when protests kick off in Dickens's social commentaries it's in _Hard Times_ , or the back-story of the first volume of _David Copperfield_. _Carol_ was a different fettle of kitsch.*

“Listen,” I added quickly, before the hedgehog could ask for more details. “While I'm gone, I want you to see about getting the Borges initiative online. The movie tie-ins have been filling the gap so far, but if I can't sort things out today we're going to need to try the full Pierre Menard, okay?”

Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle looked tense. “Menarding” meant taking a book offline and replacing it with an exact replica that had been formed by a different author through convergent literary evolution. The procedure was both experimental and nonsensical, but it had worked for _Don Quixote_. I was desperate enough to give it a shot. Tiggy nodded and wished me luck, pressing a freshly laundered handkerchief into my coat pocket at the same time.

Five minutes later I was out of Norland Park and making my way through the vast space of the Great Library. I stopped to share a few words with the Cheshire Cat, and then I found myself on the snowbound biscuit-tin streets of Dickensian London.

oOo

The truth is, I do not like _A Christmas Carol_. It's not that I can't appreciate its craft or the tenacious sentiment of its central conceit. It's more personal than that. Some books are always marked by the bad memories of the first time you read them. Or the last. In this particular case, the story of Scrooge's haunting and redemption was changed for me forever by the memory of a night when it was read to me by a well-meaning nurse after I'd woken from another round of nightmares. I hadn't been able to reread the novella right the way through since the Christmas of '73.

Still, I knew these streets and paragraphs well. I had read the book often enough before the Crimea for them to have left deep ruts in my mind. The snow was thick on the ground. It swirled prettily about my face, making my cheeks glow in the requisite Dickensian way. I was glad I'd chosen to costume myself with a white furry hat and a muff. Inside the muff I'd stowed a gun loaded with Eraserheads. I didn't want to use it in here, heavens knew, but even though I was now a good sixty years antecedent to _Scouting for Boys_ , it was always good sense to be prepared. Blending into the crowd, I made my way around the streets past 'Scrooge and Marley', towards the courtyard where Marley's old rooms lay. Everything looked as it should. Around me the generics bustled through their lives with hearty goodwill and the occasional bout of pathos.

I had almost started to relax when a fragment of innocuous description in the candlelight caught me off-guard. _Candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air_. For a split second, the world around me flickered. The snowy cobbled street churned with mud, mud flew through the air, and the ruddy smears turned to blood. Blood on the windscreen, blood in the air, blood everywhere. 

I squeezed my eyes shut and took a deep breath. When I opened them the world was just as it should be. A scruffy orphan asked me the time and then stole my new handkerchief before running off to join his friends at a makeshift slide. This was the problem with being an outlander in book world. It gave me insight my written colleagues lacked, but it also came with the baggage of a lifelong reader's memories.

I pulled myself together. I had a job to do.

The old house was dark and silent. The old brass knocker wasn't due to turn into Jacob Marley's face until the end of the chapter. It sat dull and innocuous upon the door. I watched it for signs of movement, but it gave nothing away. The rest of the courtyard was nondescript, looking very much like most courtyards in high-Victorian literary London. There was a long vertical crack in the wall opposite the door, into which I wedged a crampon from which to hang a lantern, leaving my hands free as I looked about me. I searched the yard, but found nothing untoward.

My best course of action for now was to follow the narrative. I doused my light and went to find the callous old man who was about to be haunted. Along the way I did my best to drive my own ghosts from my mind.

oOo

I slipped into 'Scrooge and Marley' behind the two portly charity collectors who had come to appeal to Scrooge's nonexistent Christmas spirit. Nobody saw me. I was blocked from Scrooge's sight by the bulk of the men, and Cratchit was too horrified by the prospect of what was about to occur to notice a woman sneak in with them and hide in the undescribed coat cupboard. I had run into Ebeneezer Scrooge now and again at various BookWorld events. Here in his element he looked meaner and more ill-tempered than I had ever seen him. _A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!_ It was funny: I always remembered that line. And when I recited it, the voice in my head was never my own. I heard it instead in the admiring, ironic baritone of my lecturer, arch-enemy, and one-time mentor Acheron Hades.

Outside my cupboard, the plot tripped along. I tried to pay attention, but it seemed I was condemned to memories of the past tonight. It had been a good lecture. I'd forgotten that in the years since A Christmas Carol had become part of the Crimea for me. Hades had argued with passion and absolute moral perversion for a different reading of the final ghost's role. For him, a satisfying ending could only come with the failure of Scrooge's reform in the face of both his and Tiny Tim's inescapable mortality and a final fatalistic fulfilment of the third spirit's vision. As the daughter of a Chronoguard I'd taken him to task in class for his reading, and he'd taken me to dinner afterwards for mine. Soulless and evil incarnate he may have been, but he'd had a hell of a way with books.

The charity collectors were ejected from Scrooge's place of business in a barrage of curses. I saw one of them surreptitiously flip Scrooge the bird. Soon it would be time to leave this setting and move on to Marley's first appearance. Scrooge was the next to make his exit, leaving Cratchit to close up. Before I followed him I cast one last curious look around the rooms. There was Scrooge's desk. There was his paltry fire and the well-guarded coal-box. There was the room where Cratchit worked. A dismal little cell, like... I squinted a bit to bring it into focus... _a dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank_. A sort of tank. Dickens, no doubt, was thinking of natural history. But I was thinking of the Crimea again. A stultifying darkness. The tearing of metal. A crush of bodies.

I stumbled out into the snow after Scrooge leaving the door to smack shut in Bob Cratchit's face.

oOo

When I caught up with Scrooge he was already making his way across the courtyard I'd just searched. When he reached the door he took his time fumbling for his keys. I saw him cast a glance at the knocker. Nothing. Now Scrooge made something of a show of picking out the correct key from the bunch, placing it theatrically in the lock, and turning it as slowly and emphatically as he could. The knocker remained completely unhaunted by Marley's ghost.

“Well bugger him,” huffed Scrooge and slumped against the frosted door-frame. “Selfish, posthumous git.”

We were solidly off-script now. I stepped out of the shadows and made myself known.

“Still no sign?”

Scrooge shook his head. 

“I don't understand it,” he said. “We've been partners in this fable for a hundred and fifty years. What's he playing at, eh?” He pulled a hip flask from his pocket and took a swig before offering it to me. I declined. Scrooge ushered me inside.

Inside, the house was dark and creepier even than the home of my old mentor Miss Havisham. A wide staircase swept up into the gloom. I expected Scrooge to lead me up that way to his rooms, but instead he opened a door to our immediate left where I found a comfortable study and a roaring fire waiting. I sat down in a chair so decadent I suspected he'd had it shipped in from a _fin-de-siècle_ romance. Scrooge sat opposite me in its twin, still muttering to himself about Marley's betrayal.

“Mr Scrooge,” I asked. “Could you take me through what happened again?” I was determined to catch whatever it was my agents had missed.

“Not much to tell,” said Scrooge. “A week ago I came home to a perfectly unhaunted knocker. When I went upstairs, Marley never showed up. All I found was this letter by the stove near my gruel.”

He passed me a sheet of very official looking paper covered in a curling script. I'd already seen a facsimile from the first reports. It was on 'Scrooge and Marley' headed stationery. In angry, if non-specific, terms it asked for fair play for the minor characters of the novella, accused Scrooge of forgetting to share the limelight, and promised that Marley would manifest no more until matters improved.

“What am I to do, Miss Next?” Scrooge wailed. “Without Marley I'm doomed forever. There's nothing for me but ignorance and damnation. And what kind of a plot is that, I ask you?”

“Faust made it work,” I offered weakly. Scrooge went once more for his hip flask.

I turned my attention back to the document again. Something that had been bothering me about it when I saw the copy pressed itself upon me even more now as I looked at the paper and ink.

“Mr Scrooge, are you sure Jacob Marley wrote this?” I asked.

Scrooge looked perplexed. 

“It's on our paper,” he said.

The world of fiction is full of many brilliant and fascinating characters, many of whom are dear friends of mine and even more of whom are very dear to my heart. It's an inherent flaw of many of them, however, that they're not much good at thinking outside the box.

“Do you have anything around here that was written by Jacob Marley?” I asked.

Scrooge thought about this. “Half a moment,” he said. He left the room and returned more quickly than I would have expected for a man of his age. He was holding an old bill of sale.

I took it from him and compared it to the notification of Marley's strike. It was hard to tell. Handwriting analysis formed no part of the plot of _A Christmas Carol_ , and techniques that would have worked flawlessly in Conan Doyle's opus yielded no results here. Still, there was something in the character of the writing in the note that was tugging at my unconscious.

My brother Anton's name slithered across my mind. _Not now, Thursday_ , I thought severely. 

To distract myself from my own troubles I began explaining my suspicions to Scrooge as simply as I could, trying to make him follow.

“Ebeneezer, can you think of anyone besides Marley who might be upset about their role in _A Christmas Carol_ of late?” He looked at me blankly. “Is there anyone else with cause for complaint?” I pressed him.

“Like who?” he asked. “We're a merry family here! At least we are by the end.”

I racked my brains.

“Is there anyone who might be feeling neglected?” I asked. “Mr Fezziwig? Belinda Cratchit? Your fiancée Belle?”

But Scrooge shook his head at every suggestion. “I saw Fezziwig this morning. He hasn't it in him to be bitter about _anything_ , and he's as upset about this unwanted exorcism of our spirits as I am. As for Belle and Belinda, you know how Dickens's women can be. They're charming creatures both, but neither's ever been above a C-7 generic. They haven't the wit.”

I had to agree with him on both points.

Between us we tried to come up with other characters who might be worth investigating. Scrooge's nephew? His wife? His sister? The schoolmaster? Tiny Tim??

For the best part of an hour we argued over and dismissed every possibility. All the time, memories of Anton and the Crimea kept threatening to push their way into my mind. It ought to have been safe here, away from the plot. But memory is funny like that.

Scrooge had given up in despair and sat silently sipping the only spirits currently available to him. I continued to stare at the document in my hand. Something in the curl of the 's' and the stroke of the 'u' bothered me.

 _Anton_ , my brain whispered again. And then suddenly it clicked.

“Not 'Anton' – ' _Antoine_ '!” I cried aloud, startling Scrooge.

“What?” he asked as he mopped the alcohol from his waistcoat with his sleeve.

“Antoine Galland!” I explained. “Eighteenth-century French collector of _One Thousand and One Nights_! Come with me!”

I dragged Scrooge from his chair and back out into the freezing courtyard. There in front of us was the crack in the wall I'd used earlier for my lamp. Another Anton there, I realised. Anton Chekhov. Chekhov's Gun – I'd never have bothered to mention that crack in the wall if it wasn't going to be important later in the story. I was sure now that I was right. With absolute confidence I stood before the wall and held out my arms.

“Open Sesame!” I cried.

oOo

For a moment nothing happened. Then the crack widened and widened, gradually revealing a cave which glowed from within with a splendour caused by oil lamps reflecting the glimmer of a thousand jewels and piles of gold and silver. The wall ought to have backed onto the livery yard next door. Instead it had opened into the cave of the forty thieves.

Just inside the doorway was a single wine barrel. It shook and trembled even as we looked. I could hear the clank of chains. Scrooge called to me to stay back, but I knew now what had happened. I lifted the lid and from his strange fairy-tale prison the ghost of Jacob Marley burst forth.

“Jacob!” cried Scrooge.

“Ebeneezer!” cried Marley.

The merriment and friendliness of their meeting would have done any heart good, as the Christmas spirit poured back into the world of the book.

“Quick, quick!” said Scrooge. “Into the knocker with you! No time to lose!”

“Calm down, Ebeneezer old boy. You're not reformed yet, you know,” said Marley. His pigtail bobbed as he floated through the air towards the door. Ebeneezer Scrooge quickly resumed his most derisive sneer, and suddenly I felt the story resume around me. Marley manifested in the door knocker. Scrooge looked suitably perturbed, then he let himself into his home and the narrative drifted away into the rooms high above us.

“Right,” I said once I was sure they were gone. “Come out here right now, Ali Baba, and explain yourself.”

A tall man in foreign clothes shuffled out of the cave. He carried an axe in his belt. His expression was both guilty and petulant. 

“Close Sesame,” he muttered sullenly. The cave entrance slid shut behind him leaving the dark Victorian night treasure-free once more. I looked him up and down.

“Come on,” I said. “We've got a good thirty pages before your cue, you can explain yourself over a drink.”

It didn't take much to pry Ali Baba's story from him. Yes, he'd kidnapped Marley. Yes, he'd written the threatening note. Yes, all of this consternation and upset had been his doing. When I asked him why, his answer came bubbling out with the passion that only years of repressed bitterness can muster.

“I could have done pantomime!” he spat. “I could have stayed in fairy tales. Or gone over to academia. But no, they promised me I could be an Ali Baba in literature and I jumped at the chance. Ha! More fool I.” He stared into the dark depths of his ale. “Supposing,” he said. “Supposing I don't head over to the schoolroom in thirty pages. Supposing I miss my cue. Who'd notice? Nobody, that's who.” 

I began to interrupt, but he waved me aside.

“Maybe a few die-hard scholars then. But not your average reader. I never make it to any of the adaptations, you know. How many people even know that Ali Baba appears in _A Christmas Carol_? I'm pointless.”

“That's not true!” I insisted unconvincingly.

“Oh yeah? And how long did it take you to even remember me when you were trying to work out what had happened to Marley, then?”

My silence spoke for me. The honest merchant scowled again.

“What's the point of it, Miss Next? Why am I even here?”

I tried to think of a good answer.

“You're an intertextual bridge,” I offered. “Without you we'd have to go the long way round through Thackery to get to eastern fairy tales from here.”

Ali Baba shook his head despondently. “You could just go through the bedtime stories in _David Copperfield_ ,” he pointed out.

Now I was at a loss.

“Well we can't rewrite the book,” I said. “What is it you want?”

He shrugged. “I just want something to do, Miss Next. It's boring and lonely in here. At least while I had Marley captive I had somebody to talk to. Well... listen to, mostly,” he conceded. “To be honest, he's a bit of a buzz-kill, that one.”

I glanced at the modified watch on my wrist.

“Come on, Ali Baba. They're on their way to the schoolroom. Go and make your appearance at the old school, and I'll meet you back at the denouement. I'm sure I'll have thought of something by then.”

Back through the streets of London I went, pondering hard. I explored every nook and cranny of the world of the novella, even the ship at sea and the miners' shack. I was at a loss to find anything for Ali Baba to do. He really _didn't_ have much of a place in this work, I conceded. There wasn't a single metaphor I could stretch to include him.

By the time I got back to 'Scrooge and Marley' I was thoroughly exhausted. So lost was I in my own thoughts that I didn't notice the figure galloping towards me until we collided and collapsed together in the snow.

“So sorry, miss,” said Bob Cratchit as he sprang to his feet and gave me a hand to stagger to my own. “Please forgive me. Oh, I am so terribly late. My master won't like this at all.” His face was an agony of worry.

“Late again, Bob Cratchit,” came a sarcastic voice from down the street. It was Scrooge. We weren't yet inside the offices, and so we were not playing out the narrative, but Scrooge chastised Bob for his foolish tardiness anyway. Truth be told, it had always struck me as unlikey that Cratchit should be late to work that morning. A man with that much to lose if his unspeakably cruel boss lost his temper should really not be eighteen minutes past his time. Scrooge had obviously had the same idea.

“I can't help it,” snapped little Bob Cratchit with uncharacteristic peevishness. “It's your fault I never get a decent night's sleep on Christmas.”

“ _My_ fault!” exclaimed Scrooge. “ _You_ want to complain to _me_ about not sleeping at Christmas?!”

“Yes!” Bob persisted. He seemed to have found his courage. “Do you have any idea how long it takes to roast a turkey the size of a street urchin? _Hours_! Hours upon hours! I know you mean well, and sending it on to us is a sign that you're a changed man and all that, but these days we never sit down to Christmas dinner until past midnight!”

“That's right!” cried Mrs Cratchit. Unnoticed by us, she and her children had arrived to form part of the general crowd during Scrooge's morning walk. Now she stepped forward to put her oar in. “The goose may not have been much, but it meant we ate at a reasonable hour!”

Scrooge and I both looked on, gobsmacked at this unexpected new bone of contention. The narrative was at risk of careening off-course again.

Then out stepped Ali Baba, who had come to meet me: “I wonder if I could be of some assistance?”

Mrs Cratchit rounded upon him. “Why? Do you know a way of cooking a fifty pound turkey in less than a day without a magic wand, then?”

“No,” admitted the merchant. “But I know a man who knows a genie.”

oOo

Christmas at the Cratchits' very quickly became the stuff of legends. While Scrooge and the narrative made merry in the house of Scrooge's nephew, we kicked up the high life in the back-story of Mrs Cratchit's little kitchen. The genie-cooked turkey was enough to feed a small army, and one by one the other characters from past, present, and future crept in to join the carousing. Songs were sung, punch was drunk. The children played and then fought over a game of dominoes brought by Fozziwig. Even Tiny Tim lost his temper and pulled his sister's hair, which everyone agreed was enormously refreshing in one so sickeningly pious.

As the night closed in we gathered around the fire in what Bob Cratchit called a circle - meaning half a one, three people deep. 

“Let's have a story!” somebody called, and the cry was taken up generally. We fell to telling tales of ghosts and of the past. Eventually the jug of punch was past to me, and with it the role of storyteller. I looked about me at the smiling faces of these old friends of my childhood. I thought of the last time I'd had this story read aloud to me, but closely behind that there followed the memory of the first time, too. I let that memory flood over me, mixing with the memories of Dickens's words, and a hundred adaptations, and the heretofore unsuspected disputes of characters in the BookWorld.

“Once upon a time,” I began, “there was a boy named Anton Next who loved to tell stories at Christmas...”

* * *

*. Sorry, Thursday. We've been chasing flutterby grammasites in Tennyson and one got past us. I'll get Bradshaw on it. Sorry.↩


End file.
